Practice Management news January 2006

Last week, hidden among the bad news emanating from the American auto industry, a ray of hope emerged. WhereNet Corporation announced a first-of-its-kind program offering suppliers a low-risk method for evaluating the company’s active RFID-based Real-Time Locating System (RTLS) technology applications specifically tailored for the automotive industry. Leading industry analysts agree that automotive manufacturers need to fundamentally change their business processes by embracing RFID and improving asset management.

In your firm today, an increasing number of staff members – from the partner level to the administrative staff - are experiencing burnout, low productivity, dissatisfaction and stress related illnesses…due in large part to a lack of balance between their work and personal lives. It is time for your firm to look at how it can create greater balance between work and personal lives of the number one asset in your firm – its people.

The busy season is upon us. With it comes longer hours, greater workloads and stress. To help you cope with the season and avoid burnout AccountingWEB recommends balancing rule-making with rule-breaking and focusing on communicating clearly with co-workers, clients, family and friends.Rule-Making

Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) looking for information that can help them, and their firms, become more successful, have until mid-May to access members-only content from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA’s) Private Companies Practice Section (PCPS), even if their firms are not PCPS members. The normally restricted content, from noted professionals in the field, is free to all, for a limited time.Content in the PCPS membership section draws on the experience of more than 83,000 CPAs from 6,000 local and regional firms across the country.

Business ethics are important but a new study shows that unethical corporate behavior is caused by a variety of factors. The global study was conducted by the Human Resource Institute (HRI) for the American Management Association (AMA). Review a survey summary at www.amanet.org/research. Some 1,121 managers and HR experts participated in the study conducted with the AMA’s affiliates and global partners. These groups included the Canadian Management Centre (Toronto), Management Center de Mexico (Mexico City), Management Centre Europe (Belgium), and AMA Asia (Japan).

It is sometimes helpful to have the use of an employer-provided vehicle in the course of doing business. In many cases, personal use is also allowed but personal use is a taxable fringe benefit, according to Payroll-Taxes.com. Withholding taxes for this non-cash benefit is the responsibility of the employer. This withholding process is complicated with the FMV of the vehicle not being determined by the actual cost of the vehicle, according to Payroll-Taxes.com. The FMV is calculated based on what an employee would pay for leasing a comparable vehicle.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has answered questions relating to lease accounting.The way it stands now, FAS 13 requires that a lease should be recalculated when a change in a key assumption affects the net income.

With business and office communications becoming more faceless, e-mail and phone communication may be causing a rise in office rudeness. Studies are being done and books are being written on the subject as productivity is sapped, as well as some efforts to retain good talent, according to the Wall Street Journal. The distance between management and workers seems to be growing, too.

Electronic net media such as e-mail and instant messages have changed business to business transactions. The bulk of important business transactions such as contract negotiations, order issuance and acceptance, corporate communications and marketing programs, supply chain management, service and support, and investor relations are now done primarily using the Internet and these electronic media.

A new study shows, that with all the current regulation and resulting compliance, archiving is not widespread. The study found that only a small number of respondents were required to archive required data because of regulatory legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). The study was commissioned by Bridgehead Software, a developer and vendor of storage management software.

Want to see how leading CPA firms are reaping the rewards of electronic document management? GoFilERoom, the leading provider of document management solutions for CPA firms, is offering a free, 45-minute webinar, complete with case studies, at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, on Tuesday, January 31.“Going paperless is huge cultural change for an accounting firm,” Gary Adamson, Managing Partner at Brady Ware explained in announcing his firm’s selection of GoFileRoom for organizing firm documents and tracking client projects.

This month, business guru David Maister launches the first in a series of unique, marketing podcasts for professional services firms. The first four of 14 podcasts will be available, free, on his web site, at www.davidmaister.com, beginning January 23.

"Busy season" is the best time of year to take advantage of marketing opportunities you won't find at other times.The period of January through April is always very demanding. However, this is the one time of year that is the equivalent of our retail clients' Christmas season.

End-of-year bonuses on Wall Street amounted to a total of $21.5 billion, a 16 percent increase and an all-time high.New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi predicted in Time magazine that the extra income would bring $1.5 billion in tax revenue to the state. Bankers and traders got the biggest bonuses, of $1 million and up. The average Wall Street bonus is $125,500. Most people expect far less, if anything. American workers who responded to a Salary.com 2005 Holiday Spending Survey said they expected to receive a bonus of about $800 and would use some of it to buy gifts.

Nineteen percent of partners in public accounting firms were women in 2004, according to bizwomen.com, but women received 30 percent of partnership promotions within the last three years. According to Shaun Budnik, women’s initiatives director at Deloitte & Touche, “Since the launch of our women’s initiative in 1993, the percentage of women partners at the firm increased to 17 percent from seven percent, that is, to more than 600 in 2003,up from 97 in 1993. The growth in the firm’s revenue for the same period has also been dramatic: U.S.

Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) is a cover title used to describe different aspects of this burgeoning field of accounting. The focus of EMA is as a management accounting tool used to make internal business decisions, especially for proactive environmental management activities.EMA was developed to recognize some limitations of conventional management accounting approaches to environmental costs, consequences, and impacts. For example, overhead accounts were the destination of many environmental costs in the past.

In my CPA consulting experience, most of you out there are great “doers”, not “planners.”You either don’t do any planning at all or you “analyze” your marketing efforts to “death” and nothing ever gets done, marketing effort wise.I’ve encountered a lot of CPA firm practitioners who get into trouble “doing” the wrong marketing activities the right way, or “doing” the right marketing activities the wrong way.If you want to start doing the right marketing activities the right way, you’ve got to start with a marketing useable plan that you can create in one d

Accounting and finance workers confidence fell nearly five points in December, according to the Hudson Employment Index. Despite reporting the lowest figure of the year for job satisfaction, at 68 percent, and declining confidence in hiring expectations and job security, they still remained more positive than other workers.